With all the talk of Unreal Tournament 4 possibly being cancelled one of these
days, due to Epic’s runaway success with Fortnite, I’ve decided there’s really
no reason to not be playing UT99.

Thus, we set about trying to run it on modern hardware, with a modern Linux
installation.

As much as this is about setting things up on Linux, it’s also partially my own
attempt at some knowledge preservation, as a lot of this stuff ends up being
forgotten or lost over time (it’s been almost 20 years! a lot of the old sites
and things you expect to find this info on simply do not exist anymore :()

This is part one of two, and will focus on installing and running the game
using Wine.

I recently wanted to set up a couple of rough monitoring services to keep track
of simple server status, load, disk etc. While there are options available like
Munin which can do this by installing agents
on the machines to be monitored, I wanted something a little simpler and more
portable.

I’m quite fond of the StatsD + Graphite + Grafana stack, which is quite easy to
run thanks to Kamon’s grafana_grafite
Docker image, and I realised you can actually quite simply write counters,
gauges and timers to StatsD using nothing but the standard Linux tools nc and
cron.

For example, every minute on each server being monitored, a simple cron job
is executed which uses nc to write a bunch of information to my StatsD
service:

It’s perhaps a bit inefficient in places, but gets the job done fairly well.
One minute resolution may be a bit rough, but it’s sufficient for most of these
data points which don’t change too dramatically over time.

Some other more specific variations include HTTP accesses, ping times, etc.
Pretty much any parameter you can parse down to a single number can be
published as a counter, gauge or timer to StatsD, and then neatly
graphed over time.

I started this around two years ago, some time after switching my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and I really missed foobar2000 - it has been my primary music player ever since. Unfortunately I have an irrational aversion to using Wine to run Windows applications, and none of the native music players on Linux felt good to me. As I already ran a Subsonic music server, I thought I’d just make use of that.

The existing browser-based clients for Subsonic were either too basic, or the state of their code and some implementation features made me uncomfortable. I just wanted a nice music player that allowed me to browse my collection similar to how I did in foobar2000 (using Subsonic’s ID3 tag based APIs, rather than the directory-based browsing offered by other clients), perhaps manage playlists, make ephemeral queues, and importantly, scrobble played tracks.

Podcasts, videos, and other things some clients support don’t interest me at all, and are a bit out of scope of a foobar2000-like client I beleive.

Aurial allows me to build a music player the way I prefer to browse, manage and play music (which admitedly, is quite heavily influenced by my prior foobar200 configuration and usage habits).

This was my first attempt at a React application, and it started off simply enough, with JSX transpiling and stuff happening directly in the browser. At some point Bable was no longer available for browsers, which led to my adoption of Webpack (and eventually Webpack 2) for producing builds.

This also led to things like needing some sort of CI, and I’ve recently begun producing builds via TravisCI which automates building the application, and deploying it to GitHub Pages, which I think is pretty neat.

I also got to play with HTML5’s <audio/> a bit, as the player library I was using previously had some reliance on Flash, and was occassionally tricky to coax into using HTML rather than that. The result is infinitely smaller and less complex audio playback implementation (it’s amazing how much easier life is when you ignore legacy support).

The title’s quite silly unfortunately, but I was recently doing some experimentation with uploading images to CouchDB directly from a browser. I needed to scale the images before storage, and since I was talking directly to the CouchDB service without any kind of in-between API services or server-side scripts, needed a way to achieve this purely on the client.

Thanks to modern APIs available in browsers, combined with a Canvas, it’s actually reasonably simple to process a user-selected image prior to uploading it to the server without the need for any third-party libraries or scripts.

Continuing to tweak my Kodi setup, I thought it would be fun to attempt connecting a PS3 Sixaxis controller to it, since the HTPC I’m using has built-in bluetooth.

Contrary to what most of the internet seems to say on the subject for Debian/Ubuntu systems, which seems to involve third-party tools and sometimes compiling things, I found the process much simpler on a modern system.

This is a small follow-on on from the Kodi on Debian Sid guide I did earlier this year to get lirc (IR remote support) working once more, following an upgrade to version 0.9.4, which changes how the lirc services and configuration work (shakes fist at systemd).

After upgrading and following all the instructions in /usr/share/doc/lirc/README.Debian.gz, I was left with the problem of Kodi not responding to any remote input at all.

Firstly, I had to re-source my remote’s configuration (mceusb) from the lirc git repository. Place the *.lircd.conf file from there into /etc/lirc/lircd.conf.d/ and remove/rename other .lircd.conf files already in that directory.

Now, running irw and pressing some buttons on your remote should show you the button pressed and the configuration used.

Next up, Kodi fails to connect to the IR device. There are two trivial but non-obvious solutions:

Firstly, without changing any of the default configuration generated by the migration process outlined in the lirc README file, simply change your Kodi starup command as follows:

kodi --lircdev /var/run/lirc/lircd

Alternatively, you may change the lirc configutation, to put the device file back where Kodi expects it:

I recently spent some time in Australia, specifically Sydney and Melbourne, and took a bunch of photos from a few parks and interesting places in Sydney (unfortunately I was pretty ill and didn’t get out very far in Melbourne).

I really enjoyed the number of parks and amount of greenery around the city centres.

I recently went through the process of reinstalling the media PC connected to my
TV, which I use to run Kodi for movies and TV, and Steam in Big Picture mode,
which allows me to stream Windows-only games from my desktop to the couch.

I thought it would be useful to describe my setup and the process to achieve it,
in case anyone else is interested in creating their own custom Kodi/Debian/Steam
builds.